2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

[Grim Tuesday]

Originally Posted by Jin Hayashi

One of the unexpected problems our team ran into was the weight difference between the competition bridge and the practice bridge. Usually the lower cost field alternative provides the same experience as the competition field, but the bridge this year is one of the few exceptions that I have seen.

We were able to successfully lower our practice bridge and the bridge on a practice field built by another local team. However, we found the competition bridge was heavier. We were able to create a stronger bridge manipulator, but it wasn't until Friday during lunch of our regional competition that we were able to get it onto our robot.

I wasn't sure whether I should have put this under the negative lessons learned. It would be better put under 2012 Lessons Learned because it was both positive and negative. (A third neutral category would probably be an overkill on this topic)

Cheers

This issue associated with this is the difficulty associated with creating a calibrated bridge. We never calibrated ours (and payed for it dearly at our first event), but I've heard of it taking north of 100 lbs to calibrate the bridge without infringing on its other functionality. This should be taken into account when designing the low cost field and game elements in the future.